Video over Firewire?

[Svein Halvor Halvorsen]

[Loren M. Lang, 2004-10-18]
>  I am intresting in doing video capture over firewire on FreeBSD.  I
>  understand that FreeBSD supports firewire controllers that conform to
>  the OHCI spec (basically, all of them), but it seems that it really is
>  only useful for SBP2 which is just hard drives.  Is there any support
>  for video, yet or planned?  Also, if firewire is like usb, then isn't it
>  possible to do video transfers without any kernel-level drivers needed?

See fwcontrol(8)

I use it all the time to make DVDs out of my DV-tapes. Connect your 
DV-camera to the firewire port, start "fwcontrol -R video.dv", and press 
play on your camera. Your screen will start to fill up with numbers. When 
you are done, press stop and then ^c fwcontrol. You can also use fwcontrol 
to send a dv-stream back into your camera.

You could use multimedia/transcode to convert the raw dv-stream into 
something more useful (and less space consuming).

>  Another related question is if FreeBSD has any libraries like Linux's
>  libdv and libavc.  If not, then would it be good to try and port them or
>  provide a compatible api for supporting video?

See multimedia/libdv in the ports collection.


   Cheers,
   Svein Halvor